Seven Seasons in Siena (10 page)

My head is jarred by someone screaming. I realize it's me.

Caterpillar is in the lead—
widening
its lead—

—and then there's the cannon. Humanity flows over the barricades, and Gingillo and Elisir are swarmed by a mob of screaming, sobbing, ecastatic hysterics.

Everywhere I turn, people are shouting
“Bruco! Bruco! Bruco!”

Defying every expectation and any conceivable hope,
the Caterpillar has won
.

This is the kind of upset that deranges a crowd—people will be talking about it for decades. Everyone is surging around, screaming some observation or exclamation or, I don't know, just
screaming
—and when I turn to look to where the drappellone is hung, there's already a scaffold of live brucaioli cobbled together to take it down.

This is
real
—for all its formality and tradition and the arcana of rules and protocols adhering to it, it is at its core an outlet for human passion; and for that reason it can be as dangerous as it is exalting (in fact, I don't think it's possible to be the latter
without
the former). I'm reminded of this anew, as the section of the crowd in which I'm standing decides, by some act of volition-by-gestalt, to move toward one of the arches. Individual will is neither consulted nor respected, and any attempt to resist would be not only useless but almost certainly harmful. All I can do is submit, and even then there's one terrifying moment when—as outside the Duomo five
years ago—my feet are actually lifted from the ground and I'm physically carried for a space of some four yards.

Once we're through the bottleneck, the squeeze relaxes and I'm able to shimmy to the perimeter of the crowd and from there make my way—slowly, almost incrementally—to Via del Comune. The bell of the Caterpillar chapel—where earlier today Elisir was blessed and, according to tradition, told to “Go, and return victorious!”—clangs so frantically, it might just achieve escape velocity and go rocketing into the stratosphere. All up and down the street, drums beat out a staccato rhythm of euphoria. Songs splash forth from every direction, along with triumphant cries of
“Bru-bru-bruco!”
A multitude of Caterpillar banners waves up and down the street, like birds of prey swooping over a river. Light is everywhere—it's as though this little street has been overlooked by a careless nightfall.

I press my way into the Società; the garden is like something out of a silent movie about the bacchanals of ancient Rome. Wine runs beneath my feet; it stains my shoes. Its musk fills the air; it's like breathing happiness. I find myself stuck for a moment, face to face with an unfamiliar visage, and I break the ice by repeating the same line the girl Beatrice used on me in 2003: “Now we are up everybody's ass!” Fortunately, he laughs.

By sheer luck I find Rachel, Sue, and Kip—no, no, it isn't by luck—there's no luck tonight; everything is destiny. And as if to prove it, Dario finds us as well—he's still in his medieval togs, and his green leggings are spotted with Sangiovese. When he sees us, his face contorts with emotion—the only time I've ever seen his invincible composure slip. “Can you believe it?”
he asks in a tone of voice that suggests he still can't. “We won! We won!” And then he bursts into tears.

I feel a sudden welling of joy in my own throat that threatens to reduce me to similar waterworks—but is suppressed at the last moment by a sudden epiphany:
Oh, my God. I've got to walk from Vagliagli to Siena
. When I made that vow, I hadn't thought there was a chance in Hell I'd actually have to
make good
on it.

What follows is a kind of blur. The next day, only single images will remain: leaning out the third-floor window of Società L'Alba with Rachel, watching the brucaioli below whirl and spin, as though doing a kind of dervish dance; taking my turn in the belfry, pulling the cord to sound the bell; standing back on the Campo, now scarlet in the starlight, where the pages are parading the drappellone around the piazza, the authenticity of their medieval garb betrayed by the pacifiers jutting from their lips. They're reborn; we're all reborn. It feels like an entirely new world.

THE NEXT MORNING
, I join Dario and Rachel in following the Caterpillar's procession around the city, as it carries the drappellone to the other contrade to receive their congratulations. There's singing, flag waving, drumming, and a huge press of people in the streets, either spectating or marching behind. We pass several newsstands, all of which display the local paper's front page and its headline,
SORPRESONA!

At each stop along the route, the Caterpillar alfieri exchange banners with their counterparts in the contrada being visited, and a display of flag tossing ensues; then the drappellone is brought inside the friendly contrada's chapel and a Te
Deum is sung. This goes on all day; we follow as long as we can, till hunger lures us away.

After a leisurely lunch at a Neapolitan tavern—salmon, crab cakes, white anchovies, linquine with mussels—we can't smile anymore, can't talk anymore. My friends return to Vagliagli; I stumble back to the San Francesco. We'll meet again in several hours, in the Società, where the three of us are on kitchen duty for the postvictory dinner.

But Dario calls later to say the dinner's been canceled due to the sudden death of the honorary rector, Luigi Socini Guelfi, who was over a hundred; he'd been captain during the legendary 1955 Palio. Instead, the entire Caterpillar contrada has been invited to dine at the Tower, which wishes to thank us for having humiliated its rival the Goose (in the Palio, finishing second is far, far worse than coming in last).

Dario, however, is taking the reprieve from kitchen duty as a chance to sleep off the excitement of the past twenty-four hours; but he urges me to attend the dinner. “The Tower is the closest of our allies; we've had many dinners together to celebrate our common victories. For instance, in 2005 we won the July Palio with Berio and Trecciolino, then they won the August Palio with Berio and Trecciolino.” He has a few other examples for me, but my head is too addled to take them in.

And I do go to the Tower. But reality—which seemed to have so remarkably realigned itself last night—has clicked back into place. I may be emotionally invested in the success of the Caterpillar, but it's the investment of an observer, not a participant; and milling among the brucaioli and
torraioli
, I feel like that one guest at every wedding who doesn't fit in at any table. I'm also pretty wiped out myself, after the last day's roller-coaster ride. So after a quick bite I slip quietly away.

I'm not dissatisfied with this adventure; how can I be? An upset of the kind I witnessed yesterday would be thrilling under any circumstances; but it was a Caterpillar victory into the bargain. I was able to watch as Gingillo was transformed from a nobody into a legend, carried atop the shoulders of the contrada he'd just propelled to the apex of the Sienese hierarchy. I got to witness the triumphant performance of a heroic steed named Elisir, in whom no one had placed any hope.

But I'm no closer to the brucaioli now than I was when I started. And I can see how it would be impossible to have come away from this experience otherwise; this is the climax of their social year, and they had a horse and rider in the thick of it. Next August, they won't. They'll have no stakes in the race; their concentration will be less fierce, their focus less impenetrable. It might make sense to come back then and try again.

And in fact, I
have
to come back. I'm obliged to fulfill my vow to the fates, to walk from Vagliagli to Siena.

But for now I must take my leave. As I go, I resist the urge to wave. No one will see it; no one's looking my way.

AFTER I'VE
BEEN HOME
a few weeks, I get an email from Dario, telling me that he's just come from the rescheduled
cena della prova generale
—the Palio-eve dinner that had been rained out. The whole event was conducted as though it had occurred on the night it should have—as though the Palio had not yet been run. “We know we haven't got a chance,” the rector Fabio said in his speech; “we know the horse isn't capable of winning. Let's just enjoy tomorrow as much as we can.”

If I needed further reminding why I love these people, that would've done it.

…

 
IT'S BEEN A LONG FLIGHT, AND I'M EAGER TO HAVE IT
done, but as we circle over Florence the pilot announces that due to a backup on the runways below, we're being diverted to Pisa. Groans of exasperation—my own among them. But he assures us that there will be buses waiting outside the airport to take us to Florence.

By this time I'm familiar enough with Italy and the Italians to know that when they say there'll be buses waiting outside the airport, there won't be any such thing for at least two hours. And part of me wonders whether I shouldn't just bolt. I can as easily reach Siena from Pisa as I can from Florence.

Except … it
will
be very late by the time we touch down. And I do have a hotel reservation in Florence, and it would be a lot easier to arrive in Siena tomorrow, fresh and ready, than to straggle into town in the dead of night, with no one expecting me and nowhere to go.

So I decide to wait for the buses, which, just as I said, are nowhere to be found. Neither is anyone from the airline around to help us out. A little clutch of the more type-A passengers, refusing to accept that this is the case, circumnavigate the parking lot, asking the driver of every bus on the premises
whether
he's
the one commissioned to take the diverted arrivals to Florence, though it's perfectly apparent to the rest of us that none of them is.

I've come back this year with higher hopes of connecting with the Caterpillar crowd. It's Palio time again, and everyone will still be high on their victory of last August; but I'm counting on their being slightly less frenetic, less distracted, because this time they're not running. (There was a chance they'd be drawn to fill one of the three open slots in the race, but they weren't, so they're sitting this one out.)